


and i, a six-winged angel

by perennials



Series: horatio [3]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M, Permanent Injury, bye tsumu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:20:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23129182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: You can't save everything.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Miya Atsumu
Series: horatio [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639897
Comments: 43
Kudos: 465





	and i, a six-winged angel

**Author's Note:**

> can be read alone. content warnings for: food descriptions, excessive philosophizing, and a very brief mention of sex

_Why have I stayed on as Horatio?  
_

Bokuto’s knee gets worse as they pass twenty-five and begin to leave the mantle of young adulthood behind. His physiotherapist says he’s putting too much weight on it. His other physiotherapist, the one Akaashi insists on seeing, says it’s the way he’s putting his weight on it. It’s bad technique or bad luck, depending on who you ask. Bokuto doesn’t ask. By the September of his twenty-eighth birthday, he’s left the team. They host their annual Christmas party at Inunaki’s place instead of his and Akaashi’s shared apartment. Bokuto turns up because he’s grieving. Akaashi doesn’t because they’re fighting. Atsumu watches the events of the evening unfold from the kitchen counter and makes sure he drinks everyone under the table, including Bokuto. It’s a pity about Bokuto’s knee but like Sakusa says, if he’s going to feel pity then he may as well feel nothing at all. While Shouyou’s heart falters beside him Atsumu aspires towards nothingness. He is not good at dealing with the aftermath of something bad. If given a choice he would much rather be the cause and be hated for eternity. Eternity, he thinks, tossing back his vodka. I’d fuck with that. Shouyou watches him with faltering teeth and doesn’t say anything. The team adjusts to Bokuto’s absence the way an army spreads its soldiers thinner to fill a gap in its ranks. The new outside hitter makes an early debut. It’s not fantastic, but it’s functional, and functionality is the prized possession of adulthood. If you’re paying the bills and there’s coffee in the coffee machine, then you’ve won. Atsumu thinks maybe he’s won. Atsumu thinks maybe Sakusa was right about meteorites and pity and fate.

A year later, he retires.

  
::

  
Yes.

No, wait.

What?

...

Keep reading.

  
::

  
Once in high school he had a conversation with Osamu about their dreams and aspirations. In the process he discovered that Osamu wanted to go into F&B and not volleyball. By this point Atsumu had sold his soul to the devil of volleyball and all things cruel and powerful. He had not been expecting this.

In a fit of anger he declared to Osamu that when they were on their deathbeds years later, he would be the happier one. Osamu declared in a fit of equal anger that that would be him. They brought out the same things in each other, as twins are wont to do. Equal volumes of happiness and sadness and raw chipped anger.

Later, when they stopped shouting at each other, Kita gave them a lecture about the meaning of respect and its various applications. He handed them bottles of cold Pocari Sweat and Atsumu stared at the condensation as it clung to his skin. He was proud of his hands. He had built them up as a pilot preserves their eyesight for a storm. They could maneuver a ball to any part of the court as long as the tips of his fingers were in contact for a tenth of an eighth of a second. They were strong hands.

After Kita walked away, Osamu raised the point to him that professional sportsmen did not typically enjoy very long careers. There were all sorts of impediments to their success, he went on. Like drugs and injuries and drugs. What are you getting at, Atsumu snarled at him. He was the kind of sixteen-year-old that could grow angry at the drop of a pin, even if that pin were weightless and soundless and only visible under a microscope. Osamu raised his hands in a gesture of peace. Atsumu interpreted it as a gesture of provocation. They fought again.

Fuck you for thinking I’d stoop as low as taking drugs, Atsumu hissed. His teeth were clenched so hard it hurt. He had torn one of his nails.

Osamu shrugged, wiping at his mouth. Drugs’re the only thing you have a choice over. You can’t choose to stoop as low as an injury. There’s no point in telling you not to get hurt.

What, you think I’ll rip my kneecap open at twenty-four and never be able to jump again?

No. Osamu laughed. I think you’ll do drugs.

  
::

  
After the ER and the botched surgery and the waiting and the second botched surgery, they finally let him go. He is sent home with a doctor’s prescription of painkillers and antibiotics and pills whose names he doesn’t remember.

Shouyou wants to know what the nameless pills are for. Atsumu can’t be bothered to ask. He’s been through this routine before, just a different version. Several months ago he tore his shoulder during an official match; they wheeled him out on a stretcher while the crowd ooh-ed and ahh-ed. He thought he wanted to die.

This time there is no stretcher or choral accompaniment or camera flash. The bleachers are empty. They’re doing drills in court B when he feels a twinge in his shoulder. And that’s it; he’s done.

The antibiotics are to prevent infection. The painkillers will shut him up. The pills whose names he can’t pronounce are on his prescription in the event of a miracle. But Atsumu doesn’t believe in miracles. He believes in hunger that fuels the body like a plane. Now that even his body has grown tired of defying the heavens in a closed feedback loop of spite, there is nothing of note left.

  
::

  
Shouyou’s voice from the living room.

“I looked into what your doctor said about (Atsumu sticks his fingers in his ears and begins to hum the Doraemon theme song.).”

“(Atsumu finishes the first verse and moves onto the chorus).”

“(He finishes the chorus. How does the second verse go again?).”

“(He can’t remember.)”

“Atsumu.”

He takes his fingers out. His ears hurt and his throat is sore.

“Atsumu,” Shouyou repeats. He’s quiet and loud at the same time. He stops. Atsumu can hear him breathing through the door. “I don’t know what you’re thinking. Tell me.”

Shouyou is the god of healthy communication bestowed upon him one day in the middle of a hurricane that nearly ripped the roof of his house off. He’s making a reasonable demand that Atsumu talk to him. He’s doing it nicely. Atsumu opens his mouth. His ears still hurt. He searches his lungs for language, and finds nothing.

He doesn’t know what he’s thinking. Shouyou would take no for an answer. The question is whether Atsumu would be able to take his own answer for an answer, to which the answer is no. Atsumu has never been at peace with himself. Only in a compromise with his body, whereby he agreed that he would play volleyball until his legs gave out beneath him in exchange for a few moments of quiet. For all these years, the court has been both a sanctuary and a sentinel. And his greatest weakness: joy.

“I’m not psychic,” Shouyou says. He’s frustrated. Great. That makes the both of them. This house can afford that. His bank account can afford that.

Atsumu sits on the bed. He tries to be noiseless.

“Do you want dinner?”

How does the second verse go again? No, really. He should know this, though in a surprising twist of events, he does not.

Oh, it’s not all terrible, though it is. Shouyou walks away. Atsumu sleeps facing the wall that night.

  
::

  
He wants to apologize for singing the Doraemon theme song but he can’t find the right time.

Shouyou wakes up at five in the morning the next day the way he always does. Atsumu sleeps through Shouyou’s morning routine like he always does and with extra vigor because he’s reclaiming lost hours from the shitty hospital mattress. His face is to the wall, so when the sun starts punching through the blinds it doesn’t reach his puffy eyelids. He wakes up au naturale, at ten a.m., bleary-eyed and with an ache in his lower back. His shoulder is aching too. He figures he may as well get used to pain as a permanent state of being, and considers the benefits of removing a shoulder as he pops his pills in the kitchen. Antibiotics, painkillers, and so on. The pain from his shoulder is gone by noon but his back continues to ache. This must be what growing old feels like.

Coach Forster’s given him indefinite leave, which means he doesn’t have anything to do with himself this week except mourn. He makes coffee in the coffee machine. He scrolls through last week’s news on his phone.

Today is Monday. Tomorrow is Tuesday and after tomorrow is Wednesday. On Wednesday the first-string players play three-vs-three practice matches with the second-string players. Atsumu thinks about the new outside hitter from Osaka. He drinks his coffee.

Coach Forster has given him indefinite leave, but everyone knows it’s permanent. Maybe Coach Forster discussed it with the higher-ups in management. He imagines them poring over diagrams of his personality and performance, muttering to themselves with their chins in their hands. Miya Atsumu’s a bit of a tough one. Bit of an asshole, really. He’s been great for the team’s growth and everything, but with his shoulder like that he’ll never be able to play professionally again.

A middle-aged man with hair on his lower lip steps away from the table, which is long and sleek and made of glass. Let’s just tell him to leave. It’s in his best interests, he says. The hair on his lower lip trembles.

A younger man raises his hand meekly. He’s twenty-nine at most and wearing wire-rimmed hipster glasses. He works in HR. Why don’t we put him on indefinite leave for the time being, he suggests meekly. He steps back from the long glass table, as if he’s done what he’s come here to do and can no longer be called upons. Lip hair man glares at him but does not say anything.

Atsumu imagines Coach Forster with his chin still on his hand. Running the simulations in his head. Where will Miya Atsumu, his starting setter for the last six years, go now?

I agree with that, Coach Forster says. The next day he visits Atsumu at the hospital with a basket of fruit. He sets the fruit on the table beside Atsumu’s shitty hospital bed and Atsumu feels like he’s already dead. This is it, he thinks, over and over again. Coach Forster’s words fade in and out of view like birds outside a train window. When will Shouyou come? He was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Maybe he is standing outside and waiting for Coach Forster to kill Atsumu. That’s a pity. Atsumu wanted to keep going like this for a while longer.

  
::

  
He’s still thinking about apologizing to Shouyou when Shouyou comes back in the evening. Shouyou, conversely, doesn’t seem to be thinking much about Atsumu at all. Atsumu figures it’s all in his head and tries to take Shouyou’s duffel bag from him. Shouyou jerks his arm away.

“I’ll do it myself.” He pauses. Adds, as an afterthought, “thanks.” He moves past Atsumu in the narrow hallway and heads straight for the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

When Shouyou reemerges, he cooks dinner with inhuman efficiency while Atsumu watches from the living room. They sit at the dining table. They don’t talk. Shouyou never quite shook off the habits he picked up in Brazil, like being practical instead of self-indulgent and telling his problems to his alarm clock. He is devastatingly self-sufficient. When Atsumu tricked him into cohabitation all those years ago he wondered momentarily if he was making a terrible mistake. Although he still thinks he did the right thing. Whatever right means. A moral compass has little bargaining power amongst people who run and jump and fly for a living.

Oops. Atsumu stops chewing. He thought of volleyball again. He admonishes himself sternly but already his mind is winding back to the matter of his own demise. The food in his mouth goes bland like his coffee from this morning. Shouyou’s clearly upset, but Atsumu has half a mind to ask him if he seasoned the pork. He pinches the inside of his wrist. He thinks: don’t be a fucking idiot.

“I don’t know what happened today,” Atsumu says, chewing his bland pork. Same piece; he hasn’t spit it out, hasn’t swallowed either. “But cheer up.” He keeps chewing. Idly. “At least you aren’t being forced to retire.”

He knows immediately that he has said the wrong thing. Instead of being an idiot, he has elected to be an asshole.

Shouyou looks up. “You’re on leave.”

“Same thing, don’t you think?” Atsumu shrugs. His shoulders are stiff and his skin feels several sizes too tight for his skeleton. His back is sore.

Shouyou picks at his vegetables. Atsumu rolls his right shoulder, the one that hasn’t decided to run away from him forever and start a winery in Italy.

Shouyou says, “not really.”

Something swells up in Atsumu’s throat at this, fast and hot and angry. He spits his reply out around it even though it hurts him to do so. The words chafe at his gums.

“You think you know so much since you’ve googled everything, don’t you?”

The ceiling fan is louder than he remembers it being. Summer is hot in Tokyo, but they aren’t at the hottest part of it yet. They’ve still got a few weeks to go. In the meantime the coffee shop near the Black Jackals’ training facility will continue to serve ripped-off Starbucks Frappuccinos instead of ice slushies. People will still duck out of the gym to text their girlfriends. Everything is supposed to be bearable for a while longer. The hottest part of summer in Tokyo must be what he imagines the Lost Decade felt like for his parents. Speaking of his parents, he wonders how his mother is doing. Her eyesight hasn’t been great recently. He’s been thinking of accompanying her to an ophthalmologist during one of his off-days. Not that he has anything but off-days now. She doesn’t like hospitals.

Atsumu’s missed half of the act of Shouyou scrubbing a hand over his face and putting his chopsticks down and standing up. He tunes back in just in time to see Shouyou push his chair back in.

“I’m tired,” Shouyou says. There is no accusatory tone, just a solid undercurrent of frustration and hard exhaustion. Distantly Atsumu wonders how much of this is his fault. He should have apologized for the Doraemon theme song. Fuck.

“I’m tired,” Shouyou repeats. “You’re tired.” He moves his half-empty bowl to the sink.

“Don’t stay up too late. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

Was this what they bought a sofa for when they were twenty-six and twenty-five and the apartment in Ebisu felt so unspeakably, monumentally precious, he felt that they would have to refer to it as the apartment in Ebisu forever? As if the apartment in Ebisu were a name and not a placeholder for a return address. Over the years more friends have moved into the surrounding area. They have gotten to know their neighbors and the old ladies that do groceries on Saturday mornings. Now, there are multiple apartments in Ebisu. The significance of theirs lies only in the fact that they have been here for longer than the rest. Shouyou has wanted a dog since they were twenty-seven. Atsumu has not wanted anything except stasis for several years. Too bad the landlord hasn’t died yet.

  
::

  
When he was in elementary school and just beginning to play volleyball he had a friend called Kenta. Kenta was five centimeters taller than him and his father played volleyball with the neighborhood team every Friday after work. He was better than Atsumu at setting. During their term break the volleyball coach organized a three-day camp for students who wanted to play volleyball and were good at it. Kenta was invited; Atsumu was not. Neither was Osamu, which should have made Atsumu feel better, but for some reason he only felt worse. He shut himself in his room all week and refused to smell or see or approach a volleyball. Osamu extended an offer of camaraderie. Atsumu told him to fuck off without actually saying fuck off because they were nine years old and that wasn’t allowed yet. They fought. He felt better after that.

Still, he refused to leave the house for anything except the mailman, who arrived on Thursday to deliver a volleyball-related shirt he had wanted since last month. The shirt was white and made of cotton and reminded him of Kenta. Atsumu didn’t want to think of Kenta. He didn’t want to think of Kenta so much that when school reopened next week he ignored Kenta’s invitations to play volleyball during lunch. The situation escalated. Kenta would ask him for a pencil and Atsumu would pretend Osamu had said something hilarious, and burst out laughing in his direction. This was an obvious lie. Osamu never said anything hilarious.

Atsumu didn’t hate Kenta. He thought Kenta was tall and good at volleyball and his imitation of their balding mathematics teacher made Atsumu laugh. However, Kenta had gone to the three-day training camp. He had worn the smelly neon-colored bibs that the school had probably purchased in 1996 and washed once every four months. He had played volleyball. This was integral to Atsumu’s understanding of the world. Kenta had played volleyball.

“You’re being a prick,” said Osamu, who was nine years old and had begun to expand his vocabulary in preparation for his future F&B venture. They were sitting on the other staircase to the cafeteria. This one was further away from the classrooms and generally forgotten.

“No,” said Atsumu, who was being a prick. “I’m mourning.”

Osamu bit into his onigiri. It was salmon roe flavored. Salmon roe was his onigiri flavor of the week.

“Same thing.”

Atsumu kicked at a rock on the step below him. “Shut up.”

The point was not whether Atsumu hated Kenta, it was that Kenta had leveled up in the Super Mario game of life and Atsumu had not. Atsumu felt left out. He hated feeling left out. It made him feel small and weak and inferior, and then he would pity himself, and others would pity him for pitying himself. If he pitied himself, he wouldn’t be able to coerce his classmates into buying him drinks from the vending machine. He would have no Presence.

At the age of nine, Atsumu understood that Presence was what made famous people famous and forced ordinary people to lead ordinary lives that peaked at twenty-nine, when they got married, and again at fifty-one, when they finally paid off their housing mortgage. Presence was the distinguishing factor between the chosen and the uninteresting. It was a delicate combination of factors such as luck and hard work and luck and charisma and luck and external recognition and luck. Atsumu thought he was very charismatic.

He finished his gyoza before Osamu finished his salmon roe flavored onigiri, and stood up.

“Are you ever going to play volleyball again?” Osamu asked with disinterest.

Atsumu stopped at the top of the staircase. “No.”

Three weeks later in P.E. class, the teacher commended Atsumu’s skill with a volleyball. Osamu was commended as well but as a supporting character to Atsumu, who had been the true star of the show. He had been secretly practicing, of course, in the backyard with an old Mikasa ball he had stolen from the school gym.

Kenta was not commended for his skill with a volleyball. They remained friends. He invited Atsumu to a practice session with the neighborhood volleyball team, and Atsumu accepted. By the time he was eleven, he had gained enough Presence to stand on near-equal footing with Kenta’s father and his forty-something-year-old friends.

He continued to nurture his Presence. Something told him he would need it in the future, when he had ascended to the pinnacle of human excellence and fought daily with the gods that had shaped him. Only Presence would save him then.

  
::

  
“You’re hurting him.” Akaashi stirs his tea blithely.

“I’m what?” Atsumu pauses. The words register. “I am?”

Atsumu hadn’t wanted to meet at the MUJI cafe in Shibuya because it’s always full of teenagers and hipsters and he hasn’t tried to style his hair since last week, when he opened the front door to collect a package from the courier. Akaashi picked it anyway because Akaashi enjoys seeing people suffer. He also happens to like the food. No longer the shounen manga editor of his early twenties, he is now an editor for an up-and-coming literary magazine who drinks thirteen pots of tea a day. He saves up his annual leave so he can take long sprawling trips across Europe and write home to everyone who isn’t as lucky as him. He is one of the hipsters Atsumu wants to avoid.

“Yes,” Akaashi says, like it’s obvious and Atsumu’s a big dumb idiot for not realizing. Atsumu considers this.

Akaashi’s ordered soy-braised chicken and creamy seafood macaroni and a microwaved bun. The microwaved bun has been split in half and stuffed with cream from the seafood macaroni. He has also added a dessert to his order for four hundred yen. Today’s recommendation is the strawberry jar cake. It is a strawberry shortcake shoehorned violently into a glass jar, and forced to relinquish all semblance of personality.

“Well,” Atsumu says. He stalls for time. He swipes a hand through his hair. His fingers come away kind of gross.

Atsumu’s ordered the Shibuya specialty: pork cutlet over multigrain rice, in a big wooden bowl that looks like it came from a lifestyle magazine for vegans in their mid-twenties who do recreational yoga. There’s a sad looking salad in one corner. He picks at it with his chopsticks. “Okay,” he says. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“Not what are you supposed to do,” Akaashi says. “What are you going to do.”

Atsumu shrugs. “Same thing.”

Akaashi shakes his head. “Semantics.”

A reprieve. Akaashi unlatches the lid on his strawberry jar cake. Atsumu stares at his silver Rolex. Akaashi shifts his silver Rolex half an inch away. “Bokuto coaches now.”

“Yes.”

Akaashi leaves the jar cake alone and returns to his macaroni. His spoon clinks against the plate. Atsumu can barely hear it over the woody vegan-yoga music and the sound of teenagers and hipsters talking about hand creams and the recession. Akaashi puts the spoon in his mouth. He seems to mull something over.

“What will you do now?”

Atsumu shrugs again. “Die.” He backtracks immediately. “I’m kidding. Not die. Live. Exist.”

More silence.

“Hinata is trying his best,” Akaashi says. He makes a disapproving face. Atsumu is glad Akaashi is not his father. “But he cannot move forward until you figure out how you plan on moving on.” The second ‘you’ sounds accusatory, almost mean. Atsumu’s almost offended.

“Very literary of you, Akaashi,” he says, almost bitterly. “Too bad I never went to college.”

Akaashi finishes his creamy seafood pasta and his soy-braised chicken. He leaves half of his microwaved bun on his plate. Atsumu picks at the stale-tasting bun while Akaashi sticks his spoon in his strawberry jar cake and turns it into mush. He does not offer any of the mush to Atsumu.

Lunch hour ends. The hipsters leave their seats in ones or fives and the teenagers smile at the cute guy behind the dessert display. They deposit their trays and plant-based tissues at the tray return station, and smile at the cute guy behind the display again on the way back, just in case he reciprocates. Cute Guy is wearing wire-rimmed hipster glasses. He has a boyfriend who works in healthcare. He ignores the hipsters and sort of twitches the corner of his mouth at the teenagers. Only hope will save them now.

“I guess part of me thought I’d still be playing for the Black Jackals when I was eighty-five,” Atsumu admits, sticking the last piece of microwaved bread in his mouth.

Akaashi pushes his glasses up his nose. “That’s a very foolish way of thinking.”

Atsumu pinches the inside of his wrist so he doesn’t accidentally hit Akaashi. “I know,” he says. He makes an effort not to grit his teeth.

“Good.” Akaashi stands up with his tray and his plant-based tissues and goes to the tray return area. He stacks his tray on top of the stack of trays containing plant-based tissues. At the table where Atsumu is still seated and picking at his dead-looking salad, Akaashi pauses for fifteen seconds to collect his belongings.

“Good,” he says again, like he’s a character in a Haruki Murakami novel and exists solely to confuse the reader or advance the plot. The category he belongs in will not become clear until the end of the story. This is how all Haruki Murakami novels are constructed. You will walk through the snow in speedos. You will experience loss.

“It doesn’t end here,” says Akaashi, who has experienced loss.

Atsumu squints at him. “What doesn’t end?”

Akaashi points at something behind him.

“All of it.”

  
::

  
Very few high school athletes become professional athletes. Most decide to pursue an engineering degree or vocational training after high school so as to continue the family business or start their own. The few who perform well enough in their sport at the ages of fifteen-to-eighteen may be given the chance to play for a professional team.

That being said, the process of selection is long and disgusting and begins the moment one picks up a ball or a racket or whatever else. If you want to become a professional athlete, you must hand yourself over to the sport. This is the golden rule of their world. It has bound the feet of generations and generations of young bright women and men, the way the Chinese used to bind the feet of young girls so they would stay beautiful forever. Side effects included excruciating pain and that they would never be able to run away, even in the event of a fire. Both outcomes were desired.

The average professional athlete retires in their late twenties. The average NFL football player has a career of three-point-three years. The average human being will never get the chance to stand on the court amidst the spotlights and the screaming and the sound of expectation.

The human experience is defined by absence.

When Akaashi was twenty four and Bokuto was twenty five, they went to Italy. It was a six-day trip that included a stopover at Milan and a visit to a sprawling castle surrounded on all sides by a clear blue lake. Akaashi had stumbled across the tour package in the advertisements of the Mainichi newspaper, which he still read daily. Bokuto said yes before Akaashi could ask. Bokuto had been reading the newspaper over Akaashi’s shoulder while he had his second breakfast of the day, after his first morning run. The second breakfast of the day comprised multi-grain toast with smashed avocado and a sunny-side up, because Akaashi had started reading vegan yoga mom magazines recently. Bokuto liked adding soy sauce to the egg. The soy sauce would drip onto the smashed avocado and seep into the toast. Akaashi thought this was disgusting.

They left during the off-season, and for a week the gymnasium did not shudder but rather thrum gently with wild uncontainable energy. Its various inhabitants both enjoyed and felt strangely unsettled by the quiet. Bokuto’s voice had not filled any discernible hole but now that it was gone, a void had sprung up of its own accord with a long, convoluted history.

Luckily, Bokuto returned the day after they touched down at Narita airport. They could not miss him for long. He would not allow it.

Three years later Bokuto’s knee decided it was tired of being a knee. Akaashi had been anticipating this, but not in the ways that one might have expected. He had been setting aside a stipulated amount of his salary each month in the event of a natural disaster or the apocalypse. Much like Sakusa, though for different reasons, Akaashi was always prepared. Several weeks before Bokuto’s twenty-eighth birthday, Bokuto blew out his knee, permanently. They attended consultations and therapy sessions. At the end of a draining month full of flights and fights and long phone calls, both of Bokuto’s physiotherapists spun around in their spinny chairs and gave them The Look. Bokuto would have to quit.

Akaashi suggested they make a second trip to Europe. Bokuto knocked over the china vase that had been a gift from Konoha several years ago, and left without his keys. The Black Jackals held their annual Christmas party at Inunaki’s place instead of Bokuto and Akaashi’s shared apartment. Atsumu drank everyone under the table. Hinata looked sad.

The average professional athlete does not think about retirement until it comes to them. They make every effort not to. A professional athlete who is thinking about retirement is like your homophobic eighty-four-year-old grandfather writing his own obituary. It is a foot in the grave.

So they walk on, dragging their bloodied knees through the sand, their faces tilted to the heavens.

  
::

  
He looks up re-employment prospects for retired professional athletes in Japan, but the academic papers are boring and badly-written and he’s never been good at making sense of graphs. He decides to go to Yahoo!Answers.

 **sufs3iufs93fs9djskkskd328djsjd38dlsdjskdksk3838kdksk017djskfkks**  
Good evening. My friend is a professional volleyball player who was recently forced to retire. He seems upset about this. Is there any advice I could give him to make him feel better?

 **TheMountainsOfHakodateAre**  
Miya Atsumu. This is Miya Atsumu isn’t it.

 **Omi_1996**  
You should’ve at least changed the sport. Dumbass

 **bitchboy420**  
“Seems upset”

 **tetsuwus**  
“Seems upset”

 **HatsuneMiku**  
“Seems upset”

  
::

  
Fuck you all of _course_ he’s upset. Atsumu brushes his teeth angrily as he scrolls through last week’s news on his phone.

Shouyou reminds him of Kenta reminds him of being left behind in a world where volleyball is the end and the beginning and the stretch of existential nothing in between. For the first time in his life, he’s terrified. Look. They’ve already picked out a casket. Someone’s hired a pianist.

Fuck you all. Atsumu brushes his teeth for so long he destroys his toothbrush. His mouth smells like mint for a week.

  
::

  
The courier arrives again next Thursday. Atsumu almost rips his nose off trying to style his hair in under ten seconds, but makes it out just in time.

“What the fuck is this,” he says.

Sakusa’s voice emerges, bored, from the speaker. “In case you want to shave bald.”

“What.”

“Like Mulan with her father’s sword. Except I figured you don’t have much hair left anyway, so you might as well shave it all off.”

Atsumu attempts to construct a response that doesn’t reveal that he has not watched Mulan. He fails.

“You know,” Sakusa continues slowly, like Atsumu is his thirteen-year-old son and he’s just discovered what a condom is. “For an image change. New hair, new me. Etc.”

A shaver is not a condom. A shaver should not be ordered online through a courier service. This must be what Sakusa’s monthly paycheck goes towards.

“I’m talking to myself,” Sakusa declares. “Whatever.” He pauses thoughtfully and evilly.

“It’s unpleasant, isn’t it.”

Atsumu falls back onto the bed. He kicks his legs up above him and marvels at how his muscles listen to him. What obedience.

Soon this body will divorce him. He will lose all the control he has worked so hard to create, for the sake of a stage and a ball and a boy who will fly to the place that he tosses it.

Atsumu asks his left leg to fold. It listens.

“It’s unpleasant,” he agrees sorely. Like the pain is in his throat, where all things sacred and forbidden are stored. Like the pain is a parasite.

  
::

  
When he was twenty-six, Bokuto legally coerced Sakusa into driving them all three hours out of Tokyo, so he could buy a dog toy that would bite you if you tried to touch it from a tiny store in the middle of nowhere. Bokuto wanted to tempt god. At that point he was still immortal, so Sakusa agreed after only twenty minutes of bargaining instead of two hundred.

They didn’t manage to find the dog, but they found a decent restaurant. Shouyou wanted to go on a walk so they all went on a walk. Even then none of them was quite able to resist the allure of Hinata Shouyou beaming at you while tugging loosely on your wrist. In the case of Sakusa, Shouyou had learned to tug on the sleeve of his jacket with his thumb and his forefinger. He had a success rate of about forty-eight percent.

Atsumu called shotgun on the ride back in case Sakusa decided to let him fuck with his speakers. Sadly Sakusa did not let him fuck with his speakers, so Atsumu slept through the first hour while Bokuto sounds infiltrated his dreams and filled them with dinosaurs. By the second hour, Atsumu was awake because of the dinosaurs and Bokuto and Shouyou were folded over each other in the backseat, drooling. Sakusa now had a reason not to let Atsumu fuck with his speakers.

“Why’d you go to university anyway?” asked Atsumu, who was bored. He had fiddled with everything he could possibly fiddle with in the passenger seat. If he tried to fiddle with the things he had not fiddled with yet, he suspected Sakusa might stop the car in the middle of the highway and throw him out. The roads were barren at this time. He would be able to get away with it.

Sakusa switched back to the fast lane. He had been on the lane beside it for a while now in order to avoid a car commandeered by a sweet old lady that drove at a pace of two miles per hour.

“As a contingency measure,” he said.

Atsumu frowned at himself in the glass. It was dark outside now. Occasionally he could make out the silvery outline of a house or a field or the rolling mountains in the distance. “For what?”

“In case volleyball didn’t work out.”

“But it has worked out, hasn’t it?”

Sakusa sighed like Atsumu had asked him why Japan was suffering from an aging population problem, which implied that Sakusa thought Atsumu did not engage in logical thought processes.

“The future is uncertain,” he said. This was not meant to be cryptic. It was an accurate reflection of Sakusa Kiyoomi’s worldview, because Sakusa Kiyoomi did not beat bushes or tell lies. Sakusa was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, only there were actually two hundred shoes and each was the size of a small horse. They hovered in his peripheral vision constantly. Like ghosts.

Atsumu grunted politely.

“When I retire,” said Sakusa, at which point Atsumu felt his heart surge up into his mouth on pure instinct and had to bite his tongue to prevent it from falling out, “I’m going to buy a house in one of those rural countryside villages. I won’t talk to anyone except whoever has access to the milk and the eggs. I’ll plant my own vegetables.”

“What the fuck.” Atsumu had not quite caught up with what Sakusa was saying. His mind had latched onto “retire” and “vegetables” and “retire” and discarded the rest. Sakusa was going to retire his vegetables? Was Sakusa going vegan?

“It’s going to happen eventually, you know.” Sakusa did not give any indication that he had noticed Atsumu’s heart slipping. Atsumu suspected he knew anyway because of the alien-like sensors installed on the back of his neck.

“We’re all going to retire. It’s just a matter of when.”

The sweet old lady was nowhere to be seen. Sakusa stepped on the gas. They sped down the dark and deserted road, surrounded on all sides by the blurry faces of the night, which clawed at them through the windows of Sakusa’s car as if the four of them possessed something powerful and immensely desirable. Something miraculous.

  
::

  
He fucks up his first interview.

It’s not even a formal interview. He’s expressly told not to wear a suit so he turns up in casual gear and sports shoes he hasn’t worn since he was twenty-five. The middle-aged man who coaches for a high school team in Tokyo shakes his hand and gives him a tour of their gymnasium, which is smaller than all of the Black Jackals’ gymnasiums. It smells like neon-colored bibs that are washed once every four months. It’s humid.

“Are you sure you can work with kids?” the middle-aged man with a bald spot on the left side of his head asks him, later, in the staffroom. The question is heavy and loaded, and seems like it has been trying to escape from his mouth for a while now. The hair on his lower lip trembles.

Atsumu sits up straighter and his shoulder whines. Belatedly, he realizes he forgot to take his painkillers this morning. The staffroom is thick with the zeal of overworked and underpaid teachers who desire to have mercy on the youth but are overworked and underpaid.

“Yes,” he half-lies.

A stretch of silence. The middle-aged man who is supposed to be his ticket into the future or whatever stares at his desk. Atsumu can’t see what’s on it, so he assumes there’s nothing there.

“I’ll get back to you at a later date,”the man says finally, enunciation crisp and teacher-like for all the time he spends on a volleyball court or at least along its perimeter. Atsumu thanks him and bows deeply as a fuck you to his shoulder and eats lunch at a yakisoba place near the train station. The middle-aged-hair-lip-bald-spot-beady-eyed man never gets back to him. Atsumu decides he hates kids after all, and keeps looking. He knows more people in the professional volleyball circuit than anyone else. He has nice teeth. He can cook hard-boiled eggs.

Shouyou flits in and out of his days like a small, flighty bird and makes all of his favorite dishes, even on the days when he comes back on the last train. Tired and half-leaning against the kitchen counter, he forgets that Atsumu has been an asshole to him multiple times this month. Atsumu is allowed to make hard-boiled eggs and dice the onions. They do not talk at the table, but every once in a while Shouyou’s foot traces the curve of Atsumu’s thigh. He nudges back.

Atsumu offers to do the dishes. Shouyou falls into bed. They sleep facing each other, or the other side of the room.

  
::

  
In his mind’s eye, the team adjusts to his absence the way an army spreads its soldiers thinner to close a gap in its ranks. In his mind’s eye, they get used to the hole in the ground. Then they fill it with wet concrete. They light new year’s sparklers for him and watch, miserably, as the light sputters out.

In his mind’s eye a lot of things happen. Outside of that brilliant temporary mess he cannot bring himself to ask Shouyou or Sakusa or Coach Forster how the team is doing. This is not pain; it is the spice of life. But oh, the spice of life hurts him. It scars.

Perhaps Coach Forster did not kill him after all. Atsumu might have been dead from the day he first picked up a volleyball, and sold his soul to the devil of all things safe and reassuring. This body has never belonged to him.

The average professional athlete retires in their late twenties. All things considered, he made it pretty far.

  
::

  
His mother is in Tokyo to view the dinosaur exhibition, so he takes her to see the ophthalmologist while she’s here. This is the third consecutive year the dinosaur exhibition has been held at the Tokyo Museum of Nature and Science. It is the second time that it is a collaborative event. Visitors who wish to see the Tyrannosaurus Rex must make an additional trip to the Sendai City Museum in Miyagi, but will receive a ten percent discount for exhibition tickets. Student entry is free.

The apartment in Ebisu is located on a slope, so he picks her up from the train station in Sakusa’s car. She talks about Broadway and global warming and tries to show him photos of the neighbor’s new cat while he drives. She has a new friend, a white vegan yoga mom whose husband teaches in the Classics department at the University of Hyogo. She has brought three backdated issues of her favorite vegan yoga mom magazine as a gift.

His mother is sent in for scans and x-rays, so Atsumu kicks his feet up in the waiting room and scrolls through his phone. Two hours later, the ophthalmologist politely explains that there are some things that need fixing. A surgery may be in order. The fees will be heavily subsidized because she is a senior citizen and the Japanese government wants its senior citizens to live forever. Once she has made a decision she is free to call this number to book an appointment.

“Ew,” his mother declares afterwards. She blows delicately on her rosehip tea. “I hate surgeries.”

They’re at a cafe in Omotesando which sells pancakes that taste like clouds, and macarons smaller than erasers. Nothing on the menu costs less than a thousand yen. The ceiling is dome-shaped and frescoed.

Atsumu laughs. His mother regards him, unimpressed. She steeples her fingers, a gesture they all picked up from his father, and leans forward.

“Don’t laugh. You have been acting strange all day.” Lo-fi hip hop beats and the absent buzz of teenagers and hipsters talking about global warming and the recession.

“Talk to me, Atsumu.”

Atsumu’s mother has more Presence than anyone else in the world, even though she has never touched a volleyball. He forks his macaron and eats it. It is gnarly and sweet, strawberry flavored with hints of lime.

He sighs. His mother is expectant and terrifying. He cannot lie.

“I,” he opens his mouth. Runs a hand through his hair. His fingers come away a little gross.

“So, about Doraemon.”

  
::

  
In another world he fixes escalators. He studies history in high school but ends up going to a vocational school because he fails the entrance exams for the top five universities in Japan. He pays the exam fees out of his own pocket, of course. He quits his school activities and works part-time at the Family Mart near the karaoke place to do so, and when he fails the entrance exams for the top five universities in Japan his parents shrug and say: if you can’t be the best of the best, it’s not worth it. Our grandparents taught us that. The Meiji era was the golden age; it hasn’t been the same since.

At the vocational school he meets other people who noncommittally want to fix escalators, and together they learn to conquer the world of wrenches and gears and technology that waits to be spoken to. He graduates, almost with honors. This detail does not make it onto his graduation certificate. He finds employment at a company that has escalator fixing on its roster, and starts out with a six-figure salary and a nine-to-nine work day.

Every morning he fixes escalators. Then he has lunch. He waits to be summoned in the recreational room which was added eight months after new government regulations were announced, and only because their company came under fire for mistreating its employees. He fixes more escalators.

Some of the escalators enjoy a reputation. He gets an assignment to fix an escalator in Shibuya station. There, he meets a cute boy with orange hair and bonfires for hands. He falls in love. They have a coffee shop romance relegated to MUJI cafes because the boy is thirty-three this year and he’s willing to pay for happiness out of his pocket. Atsumu thinks he would empty his retirement savings for him.

In another world, he fixes escalators.

In this one, he fixes himself. Over and over again, he renews his muscles and his bones and his teeth, trading bottles of sake for visits to his physiotherapist and his bone surgeon and his shoulder surgeon. Atsumu wants to think everything is fixable. He wants to think he will still be playing volleyball for the Black Jackals when he is eighty-five, while Osamu will be miserable and too frail to climb a flight of stairs. Atsumu is not an idealist. But he believes in something.

In another world, there are no problems. In another world humanity was wiped out by the dinosaurs. In another world. Another time. Another place.

In a Ghibli movie he learns about the importance of perseverance and faith and loving yourself. That one’s intrinsic value is not defined by the way they handle a ball.

In real life, he has to change his toothbrush a week after being discharged from the hospital, because the bristles keep poking at his gums and he hates the taste of blood in his mouth. He’s so mad at himself he could die, but he can’t raise his hand against his own hand. He can’t make his body fix itself.

Nothing listens, so neither will he.

  
::

  
“How are the drugs coming along?”

“Fuck you ‘Samu.”

“No thanks. You deal with your own shit. My business is flourishing.”

“Fuck your business too.”

“You’re the best twin brother I could ever ask for. I don’t know what I was thinking when I prayed to the heavens that you’d be able to play volleyball until you were eighty-six.”

“Eighty-five, actually. Eighty-five was the goal.”

“You had a goal? You were actually thinking about this?”

“No. Obviously I was thinking about drugs.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Thanks for praying for me. Fuck the gods though.”

“You’re a fucking weirdo, ‘Tsumu.”

“You too.”

  
::

A month later he receives his first job offer. He wakes up at four-thirty the next morning because he’s too restless to go back to sleep and paces around the living room, makes coffee in the coffee machine, stares at the strangers on the street below. He invents destinations for them. The lady in the sun dress is going to the beach with her high school friends today. The old man walking his dog will stop at the park before going home. The teenager cycling angrily out of sight is going to resolve a spat with his boyfriend. They fought over where to go for dinner last night.

The room is dark when Shouyou wakes up. The sun is pressed to the window with its palms against the glass, trapped in the heat-haze of summer. Atsumu sits on the edge of the bed with his face turned away from the light, and holds out his phone.

“I’m not playing volleyball anymore,” he says simply.

Shouyou blinks at him. A sound like relief escapes but he catches himself in the middle of it. He covers his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Atsumu,” he says, rubbing his eyes. His voice is scratchy with disuse and his gaze is clear, cutting. “God. Just.” Shouyou’s hand reaching through the darkness, limned in silver. “Come here.”

It’s not like they haven’t spoken to each other in weeks, but Atsumu has been an asshole for most, if not all of that time, and Shouyou is good at forgiving but not forgetting. Shouyou experiences the world in technicolor. For once in his life, Atsumu can see the contract he will sign with his bare eyes. This is not a contract between his body and his soul. It is a contract between his body and the world. If it does not help him, nothing will.

Shouyou presses him into the bed, and Atsumu feels, acutely, the weight of his heart above him. He needs to stop being an asshole. Shouyou tells him his hair is gross. They stutter into the shower under that premise and end up fucking against the bathroom wall. Neither of them can be bothered to turn off the water. It gets into Atsumu’s eyes. Shouyou is sly and rough but he cradles Atsumu’s ruined shoulder like it will fall right off if he doesn’t. For a moment, Atsumu feels sacred.

“I’m sorry about the Doraemon song,” he manages.

Shouyou kisses him with teeth. Atsumu goes weak at the knees.

“Please, Atsumu, just stop talking for now.”

  
::

  
When you’re twenty-eight and your shoulder betrays you, you will feel like the world has stopped in the middle of Shibuya Crossing with its suitcase stuck to the concrete and its hands full of nails. You will wake up most mornings and feel, so much, it will punch you into the mattress. Your body will feel like a party you have not been invited to, and you will want to shake your fist and yell at someone for not letting you near the shots table at this stupid thing you spent twenty-three years of your life on. Your ex-team will hold their annual Christmas party in December. You will be invited, but you won’t attend.

Shouyou will attend. Shouyou is the god of healthy communication bestowed upon you one day in the middle of an earthquake that nearly ripped your head off. Three years ago, you tricked him into cohabitation. You still don’t know why he said yes.

Time passes. You discover happiness in other iterations. Happiness finds you like snowflakes during a Hyogo winter, each one pulled from the yawning mouth of the stark, unforgiving earth. Happiness departs when you look its way, and returns in the evening. You never quite stop mourning the loss of the stage and the spotlights and the sound of expectation, but at least you get to keep the boy.

The world trims its nails with disinterest. God throws darts at a dartboard. Wherever it lands you are confident there will be more shit for you to deal with. There will always be an unopened drawer. Another text to respond to. Life will never treat you kindly, and for that reason you have always despised it.

Life does not read vegan yoga mom magazines. Life smokes cigarettes like a hipster.

Upset, you wrench your useless shoulder out of orbit and toss it aside. You relearn yourself in a new language. You climb out of your fourth-floor window and plummet ten feet down towards the street below, and then rise, like Lazarus, into the thick gray fog of morning.

  
::

  
And, oh, what presence you will have, for all the years to come.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> \- favorite lines i couldn't put in the summary cos they sounded weird as fuck: You will walk through the snow in speedos. You will experience loss.  
> \- quote at the front is from 'depression in early spring'.  
> \- the muji cafe here actually does sell that strawberry jar cake. my friends thought it was too sweet but i liked it.  
> \- in a surprising twist of events joie de vivre and horatio are basically part of the same timeline now. this is pretty funny to me. it also makes zero sense.  
> \- i didn't decide on an injury for atsumu. instead while looking up 'worst pro sports injuries' i accidentally stumbled upon a high definition photograph of something nasty as hell so i am never doing that again.  
> \- i haven't actually read haruki murakami since like 2015 but i remember being really fucking confused all the time. i thought that was applicable.  
> \- hinata shows atsumu mulan later. he loves the horses.  
> \- akaashi is definitely into sustainable fashion and thrifting plaid jackets.  
> \- atsumu goes to the christmas party the next year. so do bokuto and akaashi. atsumu terrorizes all of the new recruits, and drinks everyone under the table.
> 
> i talked about retirement once at 2 a.m. several weeks ago but i remember in particular linn being very excited and several people responding with variations of the word 'no'. consequently the idea stuck in my head. it would not leave. in a funny twist of events i actually started writing part 4 of horatio before this, but then i accidentally retired bokuto and atsumu and i was like fuck wait fuck no fuck. i have to talk about this. i have to Justify Myself. so this was born  
> at some point i think i referred to this as a study in grief, and that's basically what i wanted it to be. it's labeled as atsuhina but it's really more about the process of letting go. how much it sucks, how much bitterness and jealousy and shame is involved; how it never happens in full. you never let go completely, though you try. life's a work in progress. nothing's perfect, but nothing's all terrible, either.  
> for research purposes i looked up japanese articles about pro athletes and retirement, and it was a pretty bleak picture. or rather: retirement has the possibility of becoming very bleak. some folks decide to go climb mountains and shit. others are miserable. i thought long and hard about this in the shower and figured that really for the monster generation, they'd prolly all take it pretty hard. i made atsumu's headspace very dramatic, but to be fair i think atsumu himself is fairly dramatic. ymmv.  
> while this was extremely non-shippy and i took the world's funniest risk by starting off with a huge fucking paragraph, i had a lot of fun! i love writing about grief. it's great. i love going off on weird philosophical tangents that don't say anything other than 'hm. life happens'. that is also great. i realized last year that my favorite kind of story is ambivalent. real life isn't all rainbows and sunshine but it isn't a complete shitshow either. it's a complicated tangle of things that make you want to wring your neck and eat the sun. in the act of tackling retirement as a theme, i wanted to bring that out. that life never ends, but it never really starts either.  
> thank you so much for reading. you, who have survived 8k of me waxing poetic about atsumu the asshole being sad, are a barbie movie character. you are a star. if you enjoyed this, please consider leaving kudos or comments, but only if it Sparks Joy, as always.  
> stay tuned for part 4, which i've decided is going to be set to the tune of new year's day by taylor swift. it'll be a marked change in mood from part 3, but also parts 1 and 2. there will be a dog.  
> i'll see you when i see you
> 
> have a good one


End file.
